Soon to be available for every Exact Online Trade customer is the functionality to purchase based on existing sales orders (back to back ordering). Once you have created a (number of) sales order(s), you can get a purchase order advice for selected order(s) and generate purchase orders.

As an extension to back to back orders we are now developing functionality to support the drop shipment process. For this purpose we therefore have visited customers from different sectors (varying from trading companies in medical needles, Christmas boxes to plastic waste and fertilizer) with a questionnaire to see whether our thoughts of the functionality match with the business needs of our clients. Overall I can conclude that we hads a pretty good idea of required functionality, but nevertheless the discussion with our customers had significant impact on the development and outline of the functionality.

What we try to achieve with drop shipment functionality is to keep the stock movements visible, but separate it from the normal stock in –and outflow. Also financially the plan is to account in a different way (making use of ‘Goods in transit’-account) and using the actual purchase price (instead of using cost prices) for drop shipments. If we also can create an overview that will give margin insight (difference between sales and purchase price) then I am sure that we will have a very powerful solution for all our trading customers. The functionality is to be expected in H1-2012!